Thursday, August 2, 2012

New Book Spotlights:

NEW THIS FALL: First Dot-to-Dot Animals is a colorful counting book for young children. All pictures can be completed using the numbers 1 to 10 so these books are suitable for children who are just beginning to count and recognize numbers. $5.99 each - be sure to put the individual pages in page protectors so you can use your book over and over again!

Download an activity page from First Dot-to-Dot Animals and let your little one discover who has little white paws.

Other Dot-to-Dot books from Usborne: (Note the blue one is a combined volume with 7 books combined) for $12.99.

Another new series I've already talked about some - but now I have an author interview and a video for you to watch regarding how the author became published. It's very interesting!

Chris Answers Questions about The Phoenix Files

How many Phoenix Files books are there going to be?

There will be six books in the series altogether: Arrival, Contact, Mutation, Underground, Fallout and Doomsday.

When are the other books coming out?

Fallout is due to be released in Australia and NZ in 2012, with Doomsday to follow in 2013.

On the Phoenix Files book covers, one character gets further and further away from the other two. Who is that?

It’s Peter – and by the end of Mutation, you should have a pretty good idea why.

Are you going to keep writing after you finish The Phoenix Files?
Absolutely! Right now, my plan is to keep writing for as long as you guys want to keep reading!

Writing & Publishing
How did you get your first book published?

My “first book” story is a bit of an unusual one. I’d always thought being a writer would be really fun, but I never thought it was something that I’d actually get to do for a living.

But a friend of mine from church, Rowan McAuley, was already a published author. She and I would quite often talk about writing, and one day she told me that her publisher was looking for new authors to help out with a series called Zac Power.

I’d never heard of the series before, but I did a bit of investigating, and then had a go at writing a Zac story of my own. I sent it to Rowan, and she passed it on to her publisher… and I assumed that would be the end of it.

But then, a couple of weeks later, the publishers got in touch and said they wanted to turn my story (“Volcanic Panic”) into an actual book! It took four or five redrafts and a whole lot of editing to get the book up to scratch, but we got there in the end. From there, I went on to write 11 more books in the series, all under the name, “H.I. Larry.”

Somewhere in the middle of all those books, I pitched the idea for The Phoenix Files to my publishers. They agreed to publish that series too – and I’ve been writing it ever since!

And that’s the thing about my story: I never “earned” this job, and I definitely haven’t done anything to deserve it. The whole thing has just been one huge gift. All that’s left is to be incredibly thankful for this amazing work that God’s given me to do, and to keep on working to create stories that are worth the time and the enthusiasm that you guys pour into them.